President Barack Obama proposed a two-year freeze on the pay of federal workers on Monday.

The White House estimates that the pay freeze would save about $2 billion in the current fiscal year, and $28 billion over five years, according to Reuters.

Obama said Republicans and Democrats face a challenge “to get federal spending under control and bring down the deficits that have been growing for most of the last decade.”

He warned, however, that an overly abrupt reduction in federal spending could harm the fragile economic recovery.

“There’s still a lot of pain out there and we can’t afford to take any steps that might derail our recovery or our efforts to put Americans back to work and to make Main Street whole again,” Obama said. “So we can’t put the brakes on too quickly.”

Obama said the freeze would not apply to people in the military.